Journal of the Early Republic

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With Founded in Fiction Thomas Koenigs sets out to write a literary history of the United States before 1865 that de-centers the novel genre even as it "recovers the array of theories and varieties of fictionality that early U.S. writers developed as they wrestled with the most pressing political and social questions of their moment" (2). Koenigs calls attention to the multiplicity of fictional forms from the period that are not novels and convincingly argues that retrospectively labeling them as such obscures their richness and diversity as well as their distinctness from the novel genre. Koenigs explores a wide variety of texts: novels and other fictions along with the reviews and paratextual material that, he argues, explain to us not just how the texts were read, but the reasons why fictionists, as Koenigs calls them, wrote the kinds of texts they did. Bringing Catherine Gallagher's influential focus on fictionality to the U.S. context, Koenigs argues, allows him to make visible the range of roles fictional texts played in their uneven and incomplete movement from instrumental form to literary art.

Founded in Fiction makes a convincing argument that readers and writers of the varieties of extended fiction that proliferated during this period understood fiction's worth and impact in many ways—didactic, political, and aesthetic, to name a few. In addressing the early U.S. print landscape, Koenigs explores familiar and forgotten texts as he moves through the decades, at first chronologically and then thematically. He persuades that a diversity of strange and rich fictional forms and aims makes early American literature exciting, especially when we take seriously and at face value responses to fictional texts, including sermons and reviews, but also the paratext and responses to fiction found within the works themselves. Though arguing that readers should not "back project" ideas about genre and reading onto older texts seems to run counter to the project of literary history, the wealth of material Koenigs presents underscores his point that we need to look more closely at fiction in the U.S. through a frame that encompasses the period's strange diversity.

The first half of Founded in Fiction looks at U.S. literary production through 1820, an era whose strange and unwieldy fictional texts benefit most from Koenigs's approach. The categories into which the texts are divided are familiar: Chapter 1, for instance, puts "Tales of Truth"—or what Koenigs terms "nonfictional novels"—like Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, and The Power of Sympathy in conversation with one another, while Chapter 2, "Republican Fictions," considers Modern Chivalry, The Algerine Captive, and Wieland. These chapters read the literary texts in [End Page 673] conversation with reviews, paratext, prefaces, and comments about fiction—especially novels—expressed within the text by narrators and characters. Chapter 3 explores the least familiar group of texts and authors: the numerous extended fictions including Margaretta, Dorval, and Female Quixotism written by U.S. women between 1800 and 1820. This chapter offers a useful catalog of the decades' many overlooked fictional productions, but the sheer number of the texts mentioned means that attention to any single work (besides Margaretta), remains limited.

In the second half of the book, which covers the decades during which novels became a more familiar and recognizable form (1820–1850), Koenigs moves to a more thematic treatment of fictionality, with chapters on historical fiction, hoaxing, social criticism, and enslavement. This approach pairs texts and authors—sometimes in expected ways, like Cooper and Sedgwick (history) and Sheppard Lee and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (hoaxes), and sometimes with more surprising duos, like the juxtaposition of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to Lippard's The Quaker City (social criticism). While it was heartening to see Koenigs attend to the thorny question of whether novels could provide white readers unmediated access to Black consciousness, which Frederick Douglass...